Caxton's Eneydos, 1490

CONTENTS. PAGE PREFACE, BY THE LATE W. T. CULLEY ... ... ... y AFTERWORDS, BY F. J. FURNIVALL ... ... ... XX ON THE FRENCH PROSE ENEYDES AND THE OLD VERSE ROMAN DENEAS BY DR. SALVERDA DE GRAVE ... ... EXTRACTS FROM THE ITALIAN PROSE VERSION OF THE jENEID IN 1476 ... ... ... ... CAXTONS PROLOGUE ... ... ... ... 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ... ... ... 5 msENEYDOS ... ... ... ... ... 10 INDEX AND GLOSSARY, BY MR. THOMAS AUSTIN ... ... 167 COLLATION OF CAXTONs ENGLISH WITH ITS FRENCH ORIGINAL AS SHOWN IN THE LIURE DES ENEYDES, 1483 ... 188 PKEFACE. 1 THIS curious little book was printed by Caxton, and specially dedicated to Prince Arthur, eldest son of King Henry VII. It is a translation into English by Caxton himself of a French version of the Aeneid, and is a folio, as usual without any title-page but Caxton in his colophon at the end gives the date of the translation as June 22nd, 1490, that being probably the period at which he completed it. There are, according to Mr. Blades in his Biography and Typography of William Caxton, eighteen or nineteen copies extant, of which three are in the British Museum, three at St. Johns College, Oxford, one at Trinity College, Cambridge, one in the Hunterian Library, Glasgow, and the rest in private libraries. The first and eighth leaves out of a total of eighty-six are blank, but the first is not reckoned in the signature, and the Prologue begins on the second, signedH j. The lines are spaced to an even length, measuring four and three-quarter inches, and thirty-one go to a full page. No other edition is known. Caxton englisht his Eneydos either from the French liure des eneydes printed at Lyons by Guillaume Le Eoy on Sept. 30, 1483, or from a more correctMS. of it. A fairly full collation of Mr. Alfred Huths copy of the French print has been made by Dr. Furnivall misprints p. 188-214 below. and all and will be found at As to the great English printer and his otherworks nothing need here be said, but we may add a fewwords on the work before us. It begins with a Prologueby Caxton himself, andends with a colophon of his own as well, in which he gives the date of the translation. The Prologue is amusing, especially for his perplexity as to the style of words to be used in his translation. No doubt the English language was changing very rapidly in Caxtons time, but in his Prologue he uses most plain and excellent English, quite readable at the present 1 By Mr. Culley, with afew corrections on pages v vii by me. F. J. F. vi CAXTONS TRANSLATION. THE FRENCH ENEYDES. day, and very different to that in which Piers Plowman, for instance, was written, not so very much over a century before. The same can hardly he said of the translation, hut that seems to he to some extent the fault of his original. From a remark of Caxtons in his Prologue, theFrench version appears to have been written by a priest, who says that he translated it out of Latin into French...